


certain loves go on great journeys

by imaginedandreal



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, first time writing smth with smut for the public lol, i love them but i love writing angst just as much, medium to high smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-29 07:33:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14467944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imaginedandreal/pseuds/imaginedandreal
Summary: It’s not nearly a fairytale, like everyone else imagines.ORTessa thinks it’s strictly what they do with each other’s bodies, but Scott wants her to know that there is a lot more to do with their hearts.





	certain loves go on great journeys

**Author's Note:**

> There is angst here, dears, sorry. But I enjoyed writing it, as I truly hope you all enjoy reading it. I think, though, that in the next part(s) - I haven't decided how many - I will have a happy ending, because I'm not a total sadist/masochist.

Montreal, 2019

Scott realized that he hated spring. Not just for the reason that this spring made it almost one year since she left. Spring meant that everything was flooded with green, like her gaze. Her absence made him think of her eyes so prosaically, when before he compared them to gemstones – emerald and jade. That poetic, infatuated haze broke into pieces when she left, like a beautiful, fragile piece of porcelain. You could glue it back together, but it wouldn’t be the same thing.

Would it?

Could he hope for everything to stay as it were between them? For good?

He had loved Tessa, he knew it clearly ever since he was a child. Tender sweetness mingled with intense yearning as he grew older, and produced a heady cocktail of emotional and physical connection. He was drunk on that addictive potion. Drunk on _her_ , in every possible way. He loved her and would love her until his dying day.

 

Tessa, it seemed, had seen their dynamic in polar opposites, and nothing else. He found that out too late, as he mused afterwards.

 

Good or bad.

Win or loss.

Black or white.

Love or lust.

 

Yet…as much as she would say (and shout, and tearfully choke out) that these feelings never intersected, he sensed that she was lying. It was Tessa, after all, and Tessa had an impressive collection of masks to shield her true self. Masks to hide from the fans, from the press and interviewers, and, bizarrely, from Scott. _Why_ the masks and _why_ the denial, that was another question, but Scott saw right through what she tried to persuade him of. He wasn’t able to take the disguise off her; she tattooed it onto her own face – and heart, by the look of it. At times, though, she revealed enough of her true, unembellished person. He wanted to work his hardest to help her always see her own self as he saw it, and to truly believe that he loved her more than he imagined himself loving another human.

 

 

Something as laughably ironic as a basic instinct altered their pure, sweet, uncomplicated connection, the older they grew. Without warning, Scott had begun to lust after Tessa, right from their late teens. When he looked back at it, it was kind of funny, really, because around the time Tessa turned seventeen, she just left practice as normal, with her slender girlish figure. The next day, she came back as if she were a different person. This foreign Tessa showed up to practice and her body displayed things like breasts and hips and an unsettlingly pert butt. Maybe it was just his stupid self that only now noticed what must have been there for a while already.

The second he put his hands on her familiar but new body, he wanted her. He suddenly wanted hours and hours in bed with her (and out of bed, just in case one wasn’t readily available). He believed that Tessa sensed the frisson between them too, from the way she blushed when their gazes heated more than usual; from the way her body just responded to his, whether in a routine or when they stood near each other. Around that time, a kiss was added to one of their programs, and Scott was just barely able to refrain from slipping his tongue into her mouth during that moment. He could swear that she sighed with disappointment when his lips gave hers nothing more than a chaste brush.

 

_Neither of them planned the first time. It happened because it was going to, eventually; their bodies, vibrating with unspoken desire, were bound to snap like two tense springs. It was just a matter of time and place._

_She had come home with him after practice one summer evening. They lounged in the backyard, until an abrupt thunderstorm forced them back inside. Drenched to the last thread on their clothes, laughing madly, they scurried to change, and he lent her an old jersey._

_She grabbed a peach from the fruit bowl on the kitchen table and settled on a chair, knife in hand (she always acted like his house was hers too, he remarked with a strange satisfaction)._

_Little slivers disappeared in her pink mouth, one by one. For his own part, he found it hard to swallow, sitting next to her, and noticed that he grew even harder inside his pants._

_“Want some?” Was that mischief flickering in her expression?_

_As if hypnotized, he nodded mutely, not even sure why. He never really cared for peaches…_

_She cut another tiny piece and transferred it to his mouth, and he fought the urge to lick her fingertips. Second piece, same thing, and third one, too._

_He realized that the distance between them lessened._

_“Come here, Scotty.” That voice was the purr of a seductress._

_She placed yet another piece of the juicy fruit in her mouth. Their noses were almost touching, and then she leaned in all the way,_ she _leaned in first_.

 _The touch of their lips broke any restraints that he put on his desire. He moaned into the kiss, and felt her tongue gently nudge the morsel of peach into his mouth, and he knew he was on the verge of exploding, just from that. Never again in his life, he was sure, would he experience anything as shockingly erotic as that little trick. Where did the minx even_ learn _that? Frankly, he didn’t care right now, as he didn’t care about anything else but getting naked with her._

_When the last fruity drop slipped down his throat, he grasped her around the waist and breathed, “Bedroom?” in her ear. Breathless from the kissing herself, she gasped out a shaky yes._

_It was for the first time for both, and it seemed like their inexperience made it daring and fiery. He dragged his mouth away from her peach-tasting lips, overcome with the hunger to kiss her all over, to nibble on her from the shell of her ear to the tips of her toes. She trembled, harder and harder as his mouth moved down._

_When she opened her thighs for him, he was nearly fainting from the eagerness to taste her, to suckle her own juice like he did with the peach that they shared. He glanced up halfway through and saw that she was clutching the bed sheets in a death grip, green wildfire in her eyes. Their locked gaze scorched him, and he went back into it with double the enthusiasm, spurred on by her_ yes, Scott, yes, please, yes, yes, yes _until she shuddered and groaned and whimpered, and the haphazard symphony of sounds echoed as a rush of blood to his groin. Was it beginner’s luck or the fact that their bodies were tuned to each other thanks to years of skating together?_

_A few moments later, he settled her still shivering body under him and sank into a slick, snug heaven. The second he took to pause and let her adjust was the biggest effort he had ever made. And she, breathing equally hard, raised her legs to lock them around his waist when they started moving. That’s when it got clumsy; there was no synchronized climaxing like in the romance novels. He lasted all of one minute, unable to resist the pull of her body. She didn’t get her release the common way, not until he slipped his palm between them and rubbed her so that a wanton whine pushed out of her lungs, and she pulsed in tiny flutters around him._

_Spent, they lay together; her body tucked half on top of his._

_“Thank you.” Her voice was languid, muffled by his chest._

_He said it back to her, as joy rippled inside him._

_The sex changed it all between them. He believed that that it was the beginning of something different, something even more beautiful than their skating. He was sure of it._

_Too sure._

_Between them, it was magic, but, like all magic, the perfection was temporary._

Scott received a good freezing cold shower of reality in 2008. The abrupt problems with her leg wore their connection away, cruelly and methodically, day by day.

He could still see her expression of pure shock and then, sudden and near-immobilizing pain. He grasped her and pulled her close so she would not fall onto the ice, and then scooped her up and carried her out of the rink.

“Scott…” she gasped. “Why does it hurt so much? What’s wrong with me?”

He remembered spinning those questions again and again in his own head, while murmuring a constant refrain of “Hush, T, you will be okay, I promise you, everything will be okay tomorrow.”

Nothing was okay. Not tomorrow, not the next week, nor the next month.

He panicked. Ran away and avoided her, he was willing to admit that this was his worst mistake. He thought that Tessa, his Tessa, the girl he skated with and slept with and loved, would hate his sympathy. That she would resent his health and stability when her own health that hung by a thread choked the freedom out of her life.

It was a weak, pathetic cop-out of an excuse. He berated himself for it hundreds of times, even after she forgave him. His absence near her during such a troubled time must have catalyzed the thought process of “He was only in it for the sex” in her mind.

He wanted more than anything in the world to make it up to her and make her believe that he wanted her with him in more ways than sexual escapades. He _needed_ her to know that his entire heart and soul belonged to her, a long time before they shared their bodies.

He also had absolutely no idea how to explain it all to her.

Thus, the cycle continued…

 

_When the agony of silence between them broke, it was already sometime before Vancouver._

_The doorbell rang. He opened. No one else was home._

_She was standing there, and the sight of her swayed the ground under him._

_Her eyes were the color of the greenest ice._

_He had no time to acknowledge her or do anything before she snarled, “This is for all the time you weren’t there,” and shoved herself at him. He was bewildered by her intensity; even in their most passionate moments, she had never been so blatantly rough._

_The first kiss wasn’t even a kiss as much as it was a vicious collision of their mouths. Confused, yet instantly and desperately turned on, he inhaled her frantically, memorizing every curve and the feel of her skin, as she yanked his pants down after pushing his own hand away. The marks she scratched into his shoulder blades were like a healing fire, burning out some of the bitter anguish that they tried to fight alone._

_“You…fucking…idiot,” her voice was erratic, the delirious words enveloped in gasps. “When…when the hell…will you get out…of…my…head?”_

_Ah, was it like that now? He squeezed her hips in his hands and drove himself deep, faster and faster. Despair and lust was fueling the audacity of what she said, but he was damned if he didn’t think that like this, she masked a deeper, frighteningly raw emotion._

_“Never, Tess. Never, ever…you’re what I want, and I’m…what you want…too.”_

_Everything was fast and messy, but he focused on holding her close and doing everything to make it good for her, while she clawed at him and writhed in his arms. Tessa. Tessa. Tessa. There wasn’t a gram of tenderness in the ten minutes of wild screwing, but if that was the last time they’d be like that, he, the beggar, couldn’t be a chooser._

_He never knew her to scream or cry in bed. She did the first one as she came and the second one as he held her afterwards, murmuring disjointedly._

_He said, “I don’t deserve you,” and apologized until he felt her take a shuddering breath and hide her face into his shoulder._

Believe me, Tess _, he thought_. I’m begging you – believe me. I will spend my whole life making it up if you only let me.

_She started crying again, and it was a needle to his heart, as he whispered more promises, this time so she could hear. She had come to him first, so wasn’t that a weak little candle of hope in between a black nothingness?_

_“I came here because I wanted to make sure you were still there.”_ I’m always here, he thought, squeezing her gently. “ _I was scared to think about how it would be if you disappeared for good. I can’t even make myself think how it would be – just, everything would be without you.”_

_Those words made his guilt and shame for his behavior sweep over him in a new bitter wave. He had started apologizing yet more, but she took his head in her hands and silenced him with a kiss. Gratitude and relief overpowered his pain._

_She snuck out, back to her home, after an hour of lying there and simply holding each other. Miraculously, it was a harsh, necessary treatment to the illness in their relationship – it lifted the pain, healed the wounds, day by day, so that the faintest scars remained._

_Those scars would only sometimes ache a tiny bit._

_No pain, no gain._

 

Yes, afterwards there was Vancouver, and all the nationals, and, of course, Sochi, but they came with a price. Perfection was temporary, after all.

Scott wasn’t Tessa’s boyfriend, then, nor she his girlfriend.

She went to the others, he to Kaitlyn.

It was a very strange equilibrium – they were involved with other people while being happy working on the ice with one another.

 

Kaitlyn left Scott almost right away after he murmured Tessa’s name in his sleep, while tightening his arms around her. Don’t be jealous of things that happen in your partner’s dreams, everyone always said. Hah! Kaitlyn probably never got the memo.

Through mutual friends, Scott found out that Tessa broke things with her in-between man.

That guy and Kaitlyn had been buffers, speed bumps in his and Tess’s road to mutual happiness. Their entanglement had become a game of tag, where they both were ‘it’ and love was chasing them around the fake-safe spaces of their dull, bland relationships.

 

Two days later, he came over to spend time with Tessa, as _good friends._

The good friends locked themselves away for the majority of the weekend, to engage in decidedly unfriendly activities. Scott felt their love more clearly than ever that time. They had breakfast together, and shopped together, and cuddled in front of a movie and generally played house and it was blissfully, unbelievably perfect.

“I love you so much, T,” he told her one evening. Tessa had fallen asleep in his arms after they had talked, about everything and nothing. That is, everything but _that_ which was between them. Telling her _that_ while she slept was another cop-out, but at the same time, Scott could not keep it to himself anymore. Better let her know like that than let those emotions shrivel away inside him like the last flower bud before winter.

Just barely rising to wakefulness, Tessa nuzzled her face into his t-shirt-clad chest, and settled back down. “Hmm…I love you too, Scotty.”

He exhaled softly. Was it her real heart pushing the emotion to the surface, or was she simply dreaming that she loved him?

He decided on the first one, of course. She could have never said it back to him again, and he knew better, because of how she acted.

 

Perfection is temporary…

Sochi happened, and it was a strike below the belt.

“You know why I’m starting to like the lows in life, though?” Tessa asked him, as they lay in bed, a month or so later. “Something good always happens right after them. Always.”

 _When did she lose all that unwavering optimism?_ he would ask himself years later.

 

 

Later, they busied themselves with preparations for Korea, with the zeal of workaholics. Their skating, always spectacular, flourished to new heights this time.

Scott didn’t even care much that their programs were to be shockingly emotional and sensual, and that the public would go crazy with gossip and speculation. He loved every dance, because they were with Tessa. He was dancing her reciprocation into reality, if, by some chance she didn’t reciprocate as it were.

 

Triumph followed soon after, when they stood on the podium and allowed themselves to drown both in exhilaration and in adoration for each other.

She couldn’t possibly have _pretended_ that her eyes shone with love when she gazed into his. She couldn’t have faked that gloriously joyful laugh of hers. Fuck words, he thought. The proverb about actions being louder wasn’t invented for nothing.

She loved him. But why was she holding back to admit it, all the same? What was her concern –or fear?

He pushed the nagging negativity away. It was ridiculous to ponder over such a detail as three unspoken words – whatever they were – when their gold was such a monumental labor of pure love.

How he had trembled from a nearly maddening happiness and relief, hugging her as tightly as physically possible on that ice. Her laughing made her already beautiful features that much more stunning. And the sound…this sound that he loved more than anything, it told him everything he needed to hear. It spoke volumes more than any word – even more than what she had yet to tell him.

He would do anything in his power to keep hearing that special, amazing laugh from her, as much as possible.

 

That was why the celebratory sex they thought to have turned out to be achingly sweet lovemaking. Scott, like a true romantic, never understood why everyone was so disgusted to call it that. When his entire body and soul flooded with the sensations that Tessa’s body caused, how could he cheapen it to some empty, even if sexy, romp? By that time, they have had their share of hot and wild bedroom adventures, but it was the slow, almost unbearably gentle times that stirred his heart the most. Even if they never were together in the full sense, it would be impossible for them to stay completely casual friends with doubtful benefits. Emotion would still fight its way out.

 

_They had come back to their hotel room, bone tired but still riding the wave of joy, when she turned to him and smiled, and his world narrowed down to this woman, these wide, shining green eyes, this mesmerizing smile, and all the rest of her._

_He carried her over to the bed. She watched him strip his clothes off, a flame igniting in her gaze, until he climbed next to her and undressed her too. She giggled, as if it was the first time again, and as if they were re-learning the geography of each other, which they already had memorized, centimeter by centimeter._

_They kissed like each other’s lips were the source of life for the other. She shivered and pressed his head closer as he lowered his mouth to tease her nipples into hard little buds. He could practically taste her goose bumps when he let his kisses trace their way down her abdomen._

_She, her fragrance, her impossibly soft skin, could both kindle such a fire in him and put it out. Only ever she._

_He moved her legs apart, and she unfurled for him like a dusky pink rose, dappled with dew, making his mouth water at the sight. All the nooks and crannies of her, and every tremble and whisper and cry and half-shy laugh would be his, for him, with him. Forever._

_He proceeded to coax her to the height of passionate rapture, the way she loved, and the way he loved making her feel. She let out a long, luxuriant sigh when he pushed himself inside her, as soon as her first tremors subsided. They thrust fiercely, her soft breasts against his solid chest, him groaning into her strawberry-scented hair, her high-pitched moans growing urgent as she laced her fingers with his. Her muscles milking him firmly, like she wanted to draw out his soul, and give him hers in exchange, by kissing it into him._

_For the first time, they orgasmed together, as if they were one ecstatic creature._

_Coming down from that high, he knew that he would never desire or adore anyone else except her._

 

One and a half months later, Scott showed up at her house with flowers, anxious, as always, with the anticipation of seeing her.

She stared at him when he walked into the living room, a frightened, pleading shimmer in her eyes. She held a small stick with a bright green plus sign.

He rushed to her, scooped her close into his arms. Comforted her as best as he could.

 

“I thought you…you would think I was trying to trap you. But I’d never do that. I can’t be a burden to you,” she confessed later, looking at him with a fearful hope.

He tucked her into bed and reassured her that he would never, ever leave because of a _baby_ , of all things.

Obviously, he stood by her when she decided to keep it. The first shock passed, and they realized that her pregnancy was unplanned, but it was not unwanted.

They set aside a room in his apartment they now shared. Bought the crib, found a suitable hospital.

On quiet evenings, it was all:

“T, we are _not_ naming our child Olympia! Hey, no need to pout, I’m serious.”

“Olympius?”

“…”

“Unusual doesn’t mean better, Tutu.”

“Okay, I’m offering you a compromise – Patrick. That way, it’s both for Chiddy and Patch.”

“How can a girl be a Patrick?”

“Why are you so sure it will be a girl, _Scotty_?”

“Because it will. I’ve dreamed about it since you showed me the test. And her name will be Tessa Jane the Second. Don’t snort at me, future mama.”

 

While Tessa drowsed in his arms, Scott would stroke her still-flat belly and think that having a child with the woman he loved was the pinnacle of happiness.

 

In the tenth week, he was working his new skating coach position, when Kate called his cell phone, partly failing to suppress her tears.

Scott’s hearing grasped only two things: Tessa. Hospital.

 

_She was wailing into the pillow. Not crying, not even sobbing. It was the worst sound he had ever heard – some kind of inhuman howl._

_He could not soothe her. No one could, except a shot of sedative, a forced measure._

_She woke up from it groggy and confounded, but, as soon as Scott saw it coming back to her, she simply shut down. Did not make a single sound more, and would lie rigidly in bed – a gravestone, warmed by the sun._

_He had to cajole her into eating and actually spoon the food into her mouth, while she stared at him with unseeing eyes. He forced back his own tears, his heart breaking more the longer he looked back at her._

_He brought home a hollow shell of a woman. She smiled rarely. Laughter was something he didn’t think she knew how to do anymore. She was quiet and withdrawn, only huddling against him at night, when sleep relaxed her fully._

_He came home from work soon after (once he was sure that she could be safely left alone) and glimpsed her in the chair inside the would-be nursery. She was rocking slowly, eyes closed, holding a little yellow coat that Alma had given them, a handmade hand-me-down from Scott’s baby days. He approached her, and realized that she was humming a lullaby that he himself taught her, one that his mom sang to him in his childhood._

_Hey eyes opened. A single crystal tear rolled down her cheek and dropped onto the little coat, making a dark spot on the cheerful-colored fabric._

_He stumbled towards her and dropped to his knees, burying his face in her lap. They cried together like they’ve never cried before._

_Six months of support and counselors brought her back to a semblance of functioning in everyday life. Just that, a parody of normal life, as she often said, sounding thoroughly defeated._

 

They weren’t married, they kept simply living together, but what were they going to do now? What did fate want from them – pushing them together, then tearing their fragile happiness like a spoiled child that ripped flimsy giftwrap, again and again?

That feeble candle of hope that flickered for him after their painful reunion in 2011…It was clinging onto its flame, blinking frantically in a high wind.

Tessa went from numb sadness to bitter anger.

The atmosphere in their house grew tenser than a tight bowstring. She started to lash out at him with arrows of sharp words, so completely out of her character.

“It was always about lust. About sex! That’s what it did to us – if we didn’t screw around, if we didn’t let the lust get to our heads, none of this would have happened!”

Scott was stunned, the first time she burst out like that.

How, _how_ could she think that this was just about what happened with them in bed, when there was so much more? Didn’t the twenty years mean anything to her? The highs and lows, like she said herself in the past, weren’t they conquering them with the strength of someone who had a loved one by their side?

 

Tessa informed him that she needed a break. More than that, she wanted that break to be in Paris to get a head start on her long-planned jewelry business. She just confronted him with that fact one day, her face a stone mask. Like she didn’t care to hear his opinion, even though she had the grace to tell him.

No amount of pleading, of reasoning, could sway her to think about it, to not just rush headlong into the devil knows what.

She continued to insist that she needed a change of scenery, at the very least. He responded to that by saying he would accompany her, but she refused to accept.

“You have a job. You can’t just leave.” She looked at him, like explaining to a dense child that one plus one equals two.

_He minus her equaled zero._

“I don’t give a shit about the job, T.” She raised her eyebrows, and he rushed on, “You’re more important to me. The _most_ important.”

In desperation, he made an emergency visit to Kate, behind Tessa’s back.

He let himself cry as they talked about it. “Why can’t I do enough to heal her? Why does she think she needs to do _this_ to get better? Please, talk to her, make her change her mind!”

As soon as the words tumbled out, he felt that they sounded selfish in a childish way, but Kate didn’t bat an eye. She reached to squeeze his hand, looking sympathetic and maternal, as if she could read his inner turmoil word for word.

“Son, if you yourself were unable to change her mind…what makes you think I would?” she asked, smiling sadly. Scott had nothing at all to say in response.

Most of all, he implored Tessa to not leave him. They needed each other. He hated the thought of her processing sadness and pain alone, and somewhere far away to boot.

 

“Tessa,” Scott said to her gently, for the thousandth time. It was an unusually gloomy April day, with rain tapping erratically outside. “Come on, Tess, look at me.”

Her head remained turned away. He approached, took her hand, grateful that she at least did not pull hers out of his grasp. She stared down at their joined hands on her lap.

“I love you, and don’t give me that look, because I know you love me just as much. I know it,” he insisted, squeezing her hands for emphasis. “Think about it. You don’t have to go. Let’s handle this together; I know we can find a way. We _will_ do it together, you and me.”

She shook her head, though with less of a stubborn fight, he noted. He could see that she was mulling over his words, even if she was loath to admit it.

“Let me go, Scott,” she said softly at last, and his heart couldn’t help but sink some. “I’m not leaving you forever, I know that much. “Just trust me, and let me go for a while. I need this. Please. Do it for me – especially, because you love me.”

 

Scott relented. He kissed her with a lump in his throat at the airport, willing himself not to cry so she wouldn’t see. She carried his entire heart with her to Paris, as it were.

He did it for her, and for her only. Maybe this was not about him, and he was willing to give her that time, because he loved her. He would rather die than give up Tessa, his Tessa, without fighting a hell of a battle. He would wait for her, with all that they were worth.

_Certain loves never end. They go on great journeys and then return._

**Author's Note:**

> 1) I know there isn't as much dialogue here; it's mostly some flashbacks/memories, but further on, there will be more talking.
> 
> 2) Yes, I did just call sex "lovemaking" in there (angel and devil emojis). I just felt that having all the nitty-gritty super explicit detail would jar the tone of the story. Plus, the softie-romantic that Scott is, I'm sure he would wax poetic for days about their sexy times, no matter how dirty they would be :D Thus I attempted, as one other author said it, to write more "sweet smut" which would fit in with the diction and stuff more.
> 
> 3) Fun fact: I did not myself write the last phrase in the story. "Certain loves never end. They go on great journeys and then return" is a translation of a song lyric from the Italian 1970s singer Antonello Venditti.
> 
> 4) I was sad on behalf of some authors these last 2 days, who posted well-written and engaging stories only to be met with aggressive and stupid criticism. I'm not locking this fic, though such a thought popped in my mind before. Anyone (I won't point fingers) who thinks realism in fan fiction is disrespectful should like...not read fan fiction. Just because we write negative as well as positive things about our idols does not mean we wish bad things TO them.


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